Creating Rotatable Off-Shape Eyes (Non-Spherical Eyes)

Dead Cow Digital

Hello!
I'm sure I'm not the first to find a "workable" solution for non-spherical eyes in Daz, but I couldn't find much about it nor any examples for reference in my extensive library of Daz figures.
After some experimentation I was able to get deformation with rotation of non-spherical eyes (so they maintain the shape in the eye socket) by creating an eliptical "eye shape" figure (such as you would see in anime or toons), setting it's Surface opacity to 0 (zero), fitting/parenting a spherical "eyeball" to it and then adding a smoothing modifier to the the eyeball (and Sub-D to both).  The eyeball conforms to the shape of the parent when using it's bone rotation transformers (some scaling down of the eye-shape parent figure was then needed to adjust the fit in the socket).  When rotating the eyeball bone it turns back into a sphere until you release the dial, then it re-conforms in the new position.  I haven't tested eye-movement animation with it yet.
Hopefully this info is useful.
Be well.

Edit: of course, now I'm having trouble getting it to work a second time through this workflow, so apologies if it doesn't work for you.

Luciel

I'm fairly sure anime generally uses spherical eyeballs regardless of external eye shape (I mean, basically all anime is CGI now)? But anyway, couldn't you as an alternative, morph the eyeballs/sockets and possibly use extra JCMs for the eye movements to compensate? It's more work but should be a bit more robust in theory, and it's something vendors occasionally do for "extreme" eye shapes.

As a side note, most animals with non spherical eyes (like owls, who have tube eyes) don't rotate their eyes at all, just their heads. Though I assume you're using human characters!